


Being Around For a While

by charlottechill



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Cooking, Established Relationship, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Immortality, Immortals, M/M, Missing Scene, POV Nile Freeman, Some Humor, Team as Family, annoying cuddling, more missing scenes, pre-Andy/Nile if you squint really hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26629903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlottechill/pseuds/charlottechill
Summary: Nile's trying to work out what she is becoming, between the time they leave Merrick's labs and the end of the movie.See end notes for everything else.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 18
Kudos: 135





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [killabeez](https://archiveofourown.org/users/killabeez/gifts).



It was going to take a while to wrap her head around the fact that she’d jumped out of a fifteenth-floor window to kill a guy. There were other options: picking up a gun and shooting him; pulling Andy’s labrys out of his neck and laying into him with it a few times. It sat there in the back of her mind, the question of why she’d done it, while they drove to a glass-and-steel building in the center of London and pulled into the underground parking garage. They waited for somebody to clear the garage, then took a private elevator to a penthouse that was a far fucking cry from abandoned churches under flight paths and forgotten mines in disused quarries.

It was all marble floors and plush area rugs, an open-plan kitchen tucked around a corner, and a hallway that led to closed doors. Nile stopped at the end of the kitchen island with her hands in her jacket pockets. Paintings on the walls were definitely by old masters. Nile didn’t know as much about pottery but a couple of pieces looked like they belonged in museums. This was basically Andy’s cave with running water, central air, and a security system. Andy dropped heavily onto a leather couch.

Joe and Nicky disappeared for five minutes and Joe came back in just his jeans, damp from a shower, clean of blood. Booker had pulled duct tape from somewhere and she watched Joe stand on a chair like he was at a tailor’s while Booker worked with a critical eye, sticking squares of tape over bullet holes in his pants. The blood blended in okay with the dark fabric. Then Booker patched up his own jacket, cleaned it with Windex and Perrier and handed it to Joe, who stepped back into the elevator alone.

Nicky came out a minute later, rubbing his wet hair with a towel but back in his bloody clothes.

Nile felt her stomach flip over.

Nobody had said a word.

“Whose place is this?” she asked, because she didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

“Booker’s,” Nicky said. “It is well protected from surveillance. Booker, is the pantry stocked?”

“Not by your standards, but there’s enough to work with. There won’t be meat or bread, or--”

“It will be fine. Joe and I haven’t eaten since the safehouse three nights ago.”

“They didn’t feed you?” Booker sounded shocked.

Nicky stepped around her and into the kitchen. Nile saw his face, the anger and the way he inhaled to say something, then stopped himself. “They had other priorities.”

Nile tugged at her tee shirt. “Can I grab a shower?” The dried blood felt like glue and, if she was being honest, was also freaking the shit out of her.

“Oh, yeah,” Booker said. “Down that hall. Help yourself. I’ll get some towels and stuff for you.”

She found the bathroom and peeled off layers stiff with blood, dropping her clothes on the tiles to deal with later, and stood under hot water until steam fogged up the glass. The fall had damaged her skull and fucked up her hair, so she used up a little hotel bottle of conditioner on her braids. They were coming out tonight and she was washing out whatever might be in her hair that shouldn’t be there.

When she stepped out of the stall her boots and bloody clothes were gone, replaced with two big towels and a maybe-silk robe and the dirty clothes she’d worn over from Goussainville. Her clothes were only slightly funky, and better than the robe. Barefoot, she opened the door to find Booker leaning against a bedroom door halfway up the hall, head down, shoulders hunched. He looked whipped, but he’d washed up and he straightened when she came out. “Got a minute?” he asked.

Sounds from the kitchen were muffled, back here. “Did you come into the bathroom while I was in the shower?”

He shrugged. “I asked Nicky to, but he’s up to his wrists in sun-dried tomatoes. I wanted to start the laundry. Your jeans are amazing, by the way; they survived your crash through that car.”

All of it was so mundane. He seemed like the sad guy from the cave but she knew he was the same guy, somehow, who’d wanted to be left in the lab. Who Joe knew was a traitor. “Seems like I’ve got all the time in the world.”

He jerked his chin toward a bedroom. “You take this one. Andy shouldn’t have to… never mind.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter. I sold out the team to Copley.”

“I know.” She watched him swallow that down. “I thought maybe, _maybe_ Copley could’ve found us in that safehouse. He’d been CIA after all. But you gave Andy an empty gun. You led her into the same trap you laid for all of them back at the church.”

He watched her with those watery hound-dog eyes. “Them? Not ‘us’?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t exist when you turned on your people.” She hadn’t had a lot of time to process anything, much less this guy. But it hit her now like it hadn’t before; he’d turned on his people. He’d been with them since 1812, or something, and he’d turned on them. “How did Andy get hit?”

“I shot her in the back.”

The honest, cold-ass motherfuckery of it, the way he didn’t even blink when he said the words, got her. She closed the bedroom door and leaned against it, holding his gaze. She could hear her blood pounding in her ears, but she’d already learned a thing or two about people who’d been fighting for hundreds of years. “Did you bring me back here to tell me that? Are you threatening me, now?”

He didn’t smile. “I brought you back here to tell you not to be nice to me. Not until they’ve decided.”

“What are they gonna decide?”

Booker shrugged. “You don’t do what I did and sit down to dinner like nothing happened. There’s gonna be a reckoning.”

“Why did you do it?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Everything about this dude was a distraction. The way he scrubbed his hair back off his face, the way he swallowed, the way he wore his suffering on his sleeve. But he’d clearly done and thought and planned shit none of his friends had seen coming.

“You are so full of it.”

“That doesn’t mean you’d understand.”

“You say that one more time and I’ll find my own box to bury you in. I may be new, but I’m dreaming of a woman who’s been drowning for centuries, and you led them into a corporate vault to be sliced and diced and kept in a windowless room for who knows how long. You tell me why!”

“Andy…” Those hound-dog eyes again, and maybe it wasn’t all fake. Nile didn’t know yet and right now she didn’t care, and she trust him at all. “She’s seven thousand years old, Nile. You and I talked about your brother and your mother. Everything I told you about my family is true, every word of it. Can you imagine how many people a person can lose in seven thousand years?”

The thought chilled her in a way that made her bones ache, but it was too big get her head around. He was right about that.

“That’s the burden she carries. She had no way out. And she wanted out. There’s a reason most people get to die; it’s because death is a mercy.”

Nile resisted the urge to shove Booker into a wall. Her family was going to die, her _mother_ was going to die, and it looked like she wasn’t going to be there for her. For her brother. “You can cut the emo bullshit. _You_ wanted out.”

He stared at her for a long time. “If I knew how to cut the emo bullshit…. I haven’t known how since my son died cursing me to an eternal damnation I can’t get to. If I knew how to cut the emo bullshit, maybe I’d have found a smarter way to get what I was looking for.”

“Your own exit door?”

“Not just for me, but yes. Andy really was sick of living. She was. Now she’s just got a few decades.” He smiled faintly. “Anybody can survive that.” 

It took her a second to get the joke, and it wasn’t funny. “Booker, you’re a sick sonofabitch.”

He shook his head. “You’re going to get used to gallows humor, I promise you that.”

She put her hand on the doorknob to leave the room—not being nice to him was kind of the opposite of hanging out alone in a bedroom with him, after all—but stopped before she turned it. “Where did Joe go?”

“Shopping. He doesn’t look it, but it’s easier for him to wear most of our clothes than the other way around. Andy usually does it, but uh…”

“But you shot her in the back.”

Booker swallowed but he didn’t look away. “Yeah.”

Nile shook her head and left.

Andy was asleep on the couch by the looks of it, but when Nile walked into the room she opened her eyes and turned her head. “Is he lobbying already?”

“What?”

“I heard voices,” Andy said. “Mostly yours. Is he pleading his case?”

Nile shook her head. It seemed more like the opposite. She felt like she was going to crawl out of her skin, and wanted her phone, her music, some Frank Ocean and her dad’s playlist. She had none of it, so she examined the paintings on the wall and tried not to gape like a ghetto kid at their first sight of real money.

Andy kept a Rodin in a cave. Booker kept an Ingres and a Delacroix on his wall.

“What’s Booker’s deal?” Nile asked.

Cutlery clattered in the kitchen and she heard Nicky’s muffled “ _Minchia! Cazzo!_ ”

Andy lifted her hand, like maybe she’d have shrugged if everything didn’t hurt. “He fucked up. He meant well. Good intentions are irrelevant when you do what he did, the way he did it.”

Nile dropped into a chair and wriggled her toes in the plush area rug. “I get that. What’s his _deal_?”

“He wasn’t a good man before his first death, and he regretted it. He tried to make amends to his family and he made it worse, and regretted that too. I was deep in my shit when he and I met, and we’d get drunk and cry in our cups and fuck. I’d go fuck somebody else pretty much before his dick was dry and he’d look guilty when I came back. It was pitiful. So I stopped the fucking and stuck to the drinking and nodding while he talked about the unfairness of it all, and…” she trailed off and her eyes went distant. “He’s goddamned depressing. That’s his deal.” 

Nicky’s voice at the end of the kitchen island startled Nile. “Is that what you believe? Truly?”

Andy didn’t move, didn’t look at him. “ _Non credo a niente, Nicky. È proprio quello che è vero._ ”

Nicky’s brows furrowed in a frown and he bit his bottom lip. “ _Forse. Forse no.”_

 _Oh no they didn’t._ “Is that the way it’s gonna be?”

The elevator pinged before Andy could reply. Nile was out of her chair and beside it, ready for anyone even in her bare feet, and Andy had a Glock they’d taken from Merrick’s goons pointed at the seal before the doors opened.

“Nile,” Joe said without looking. He dropped a big LN•CC shopping bag on the marble entry and carried two Tesco bags toward the kitchen. “Andy, I got some stuff for your side. Things have changed in the last twenty-five years, but I still remember how to keep a wound from going septic.

“Nicky, don’t kill me; I bought the vegetables at the supermarket.” He disappeared around the corner.

“It’s fine. We can get real food tomorrow.” Nicky sounded happy to see him, like he’d been gone a while. There may have been a kissing sound.

Nile had jumped out a fifteenth-floor window to kill a guy. Somewhere a washing machine was spinning an uncounted number of people’s blood out of clothes with an unknown number of bullet holes in them. Booker, the man who’d explained the dangers of destroying your loved ones and yourself, had betrayed his loved ones and himself. Two hundred and some years, he had to care about them. Right?

Andy, the immortal who’d found her, rescued her from a trip to her own American black site and shown her more about whatever it was she’d become, wasn’t immortal anymore. The thousand-year-old boyfriends were getting domestic in the kitchen.

Maybe she was in a coma. It could be a coma. Nobody knew what happened to your brain in a coma. She closed her eyes and tried to listen for the sound of Dizzy’s voice, or medical machines beeping. She opened them and looked at her arms. The hairs were standing on end.

Andy yelled, “Book!” and he came out of the bedroom like somebody’d fired a starting gun.

“Yeah?”

“Give Nile your knife.”

He dug into his front pocket and pitched a pocket-knife to her, an easy underhanded arc across the room. She caught it, turned it over in her hands. It was very old. Well. On the scale of things maybe not so much. But the grooves on the bone handle had been worn smooth by the friction of fingers, and the initials J-P l.L., etched onto the bolster, were faint but still clearly readable. He’d said his kid’s name was Jean-Pierre. She wasn’t going to ask.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“I smell disbelief setting in,” Andy said.

“Oh. Yeah,” Booker said. “If you’re going to slice on yourself, do it over a sink. The building’s housekeeping service is phenomenal and I don’t want them asking questions.”

She pitched it back, overhanded and angry, and Booker knocked over a vase in his haste to catch it. “I am not cutting on myself.”

“Everybody does.” Andy shrugged, then winced and closed her eyes.

Booker’s voice was softer, kinder. “It’s gonna hit you at odd times. Mostly in the first generation or two, when people around you change but you stay the same. Even Joe and Nicky went through what you’re feeling, and they each had the other to help them cope.” He’d been fingering the knife, but he slid it back into his pocket and kept his hand stuffed in there too. “You’ll get used to it; you don’t have a choice.”

“Shut up, Book,” Andy said from the sofa.

Booker walked back down the hall. She could see his shadow in a doorway. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just… hiding, maybe. Obeying.

Not long after, she and Andy and Joe and Nicky took the four chairs at the dining table to eat rice and lentils with chopped tomatoes and stuff Nile didn’t recognize. It was hot and spicy and tasted good though, and she was hungry. Booker collected a plate and took a seat on the empty couch, and it looked a lot like they were all sitting down to dinner like nothing happened. Joe poured wine for Nicky and Nile from a bottle that said cabernet and scowled at Andy when she held up her glass.

“Antibiotics. I’ll keep you company.” He toasted her with his water.

Nile kept looking at everybody, waiting for the reckoning.

It didn’t come. Booker finished eating first, dug through the shopping bag for pants and a new shirt, and changed his clothes right there by the elevator. “Laundry’s in the dryer. I don’t know what’s salvageable, of what Nile and Joe wore today. Probably not much.” He collected his jacket off the back of a chair, looking at Andy as he shrugged it on. “Tomorrow at The Prospect?”

“Yeah,” Andy said.

Joe leaned back in his chair. “Any parting excuses?”

Booker slid his fingers through his hair again. “Andy knows. I didn’t talk before when I should’ve. I guess maybe I shouldn’t talk now. See you tomorrow, Joe. Nicky. Nile.”

When the elevator doors slid shut behind him, Nile looked around at each of them, waiting for the debate to begin. But it didn’t.

Nicky had never stopped eating, hunched over his plate like he was protecting his food. Andy played with her last few bites, shifting them around, stabbing a tomato now and then and chewing like it was gonna give her an orgasm. It was distracting as hell.

Joe got seconds, then finished his water and poured himself a couple of fingers of Booker’s awesome wine. He angled the bottle to Nicky, who whispered “ _Grazie_ ” and held up his glass.

Well. She knew that much Italian, at least. Joe poured more for her without being asked, and took a swallow of his wine, swirling it around in his mouth like a taster at a competition.

Nile threw down her fork. “Seriously? What did he leave for, if you’re not gonna talk about him?” 

“Hah!” Joe’s robust laughter was the last thing she expected.

Maybe second-to-last, because Andy smiled and held out her hand, and Nicky pulled out his wallet and dropped a pile of Euros into it.

“ _Ah, Madre de Dio,_ I told you not to take that bet, Nicky. I told you,” Joe said. 

“ _Si, si. Prego,_ Andy.” Nicky looked annoyed, watching Andy count his money. “She was very quiet when we met.”

“Yeah, but Andy got her hooks into her.” Joe was still chuckling.

Nile figured it out fast. “You bet on me?”

Andy smiled and waved the bills in the air. “Better. I _won_ betting on you.”

Nicky stood up. “I’ll clear the table. Andy can clean up.”

Andy grabbed her side dramatically with the hand not holding his money. “I’ve been shot.”

He looked startled for just a second before he scowled. “That will work only for so long.”

When he returned to the table, Joe went first and the mood went south. “I meant what I said. He’s a traitor. How are we supposed to—”

Nicky gripped his wrist hard enough that his darker skin paled a little around Nicky’s fingers. “Joe. Booker is not here and I have no wish to suffer your anger.”

Joe rubbed his free hand down his beard, all the way to his throat. “Then I guess I don’t have an opinion.”

Nicky put his hand over Joe’s fist on the table. “Andy?”

She shrugged and tipped back her glass. “He told me why he did it. I believe him.”

Joe jerked his hand out from under Nicky’s so he could gesture with it. “So what? Who cares about his motives when—”

“Joe! Stop it!”

Joe didn’t even slow down this time. “—when I had to watch that bitch of a research scientist cut out pieces of me? When she asked me questions about how my body felt trying to push her torture instruments out of my heart and lungs and liver? When I knew she was going to do the same thing to my Nicolo? I died at least once. I don’t even know how much she hurt him.”

Andy slammed her glass on the table. “Not now!”

“When, then?”

He was seriously pissed. Nile hadn’t really imagined this part of him, when he’d talked about crusades with his mouth full or curled up around Nicky like some romantic birthday card you could find back in Boystown. Not even when he’d been shooting people; that had been all survival and precision.

“After I’m dead.”

Joe’s anger drained out of him and he turned his hand up. Nicky laced their fingers together.

It was weird how Joe heeled to Andy but not his boyfriend. Nile had seen it twice now. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she’d only known these guys a few hours really. Just that afternoon and evening in the church, and then escaping the pharma building.

“Andy,” Nicky said in that measured tone that sounded like it would forgive anything. “We know what he said in the lab.”

Nile saw half-sentences and shared looks that meant nothing spreading out in front of her like eternity, if she didn’t do something now. “I don’t.” They all looked at her. “I’m just saying, you could fill the new woman in.”

“He said he’d killed Andy,” Joe said with admirable restraint. “That she wasn’t immortal anymore. That it was his fault—which it is.”

“He said,” Nicky cut in, “that Joe and I knew nothing of loneliness.”

“That’s no excuse.”

It was Nicky’s turn to plow right over Joe. “That we’d always had each other, while he and Andy had only their grief.”

“And now he has even more, after that shit-show.”

“Joe, if you don’t stop it I’m going to sleep on the couch.”

Nicky’s words weren’t even harsh, but Joe looked affronted. Then he looked wounded and hunched down in his chair. Nicky turned to Nile and waved his hand to include Joe. “This is him thinking he has no opinion. Do not mistake it for full-throated opposition.”

Nile wasn’t mistaking anything for anything, yet. She had a lot of watching and waiting in her near future. But they drank. Maybe they got talky when they got shit-faced. She wasn’t above using that later. “Is it true? What Booker said?”

Nicky turned his glass upside down on his napkin. “Yes, and no. It’s true that Yusuf and I have been very fortunate.”

“But why did he want to stay in the lab?”

“Because he wants to die,” Andy said. “The little shit’s only two hundred and fifty years old and he thinks he should get to check out.” She’d finished the last drops of her water and was eying the wine bottle. Nile moved it over between her and Nicky.

“But Merrick Pharmaceuticals wasn’t trying to make you mortal. They were trying to make mortals immortal.”

Andy set her glass back down. “Can you learn one thing without learning the other? That’s where Booker placed all his chips. He bet everything on that.”

Nicky spun his upturned glass around with his free hand, then extricated his fingers from Joe’s. “Now I will have my say. I believe that, regardless of what Booker hoped science would find, he is already punishing himself for his crime.

“Of all of us, he was the youngest until you, Nile, and the wounds of his mortal life were the freshest. I never considered, much, how they might stain his soul.”

“Why would you?” Nile asked. She’d meant “Why you and not Andy?” because Andy was the leader and Andy clearly had a bond with Booker and Andy thought they’d both done a shit job of living. 

But Nicky answered. “Because I have been a priest. Twice. I have been many things that were something like it, often associated with the church of my birth. Booker too had been raised a Catholic. His wife and sons all received last rites. There is a language there that we could have shared.” He hunched forward again and clasped his hands together. “He has many fine qualities, but Booker is also an annoying drunkard, a prickly cactus who enjoys keeping people at arm’s length. I did less to overcome that than I might have.”

Joe leaned forward and squeezed his hand. “Nobody missed that he treasured his grief, Nicky. He didn’t want help. He hallowed his pain.”

Nicky rubbed his thumb over Joe’s. “Yes. And he must face a punishment suited to his crime.” He looked around the table at each of them.

Andy stretched and grabbed the wine before anyone could stop her. “Are you two done?”

Nicky nodded. He didn’t seem intimidated, and Nile wanted to learn that. Andy using that impatient general’s voice made her want to snap to attention a little bit.

“Then consider what you think is fair and we’ll start over in the morning.”

The men nodded and pushed their chairs back.

Nile stood up fast. “Wait, wait. Like, what are we talking about? I’m not torturing anybody.”

Andy barely looked at her. “Twenty-four hours ago, you said you weren’t going to kill anybody. Immortality takes a long time, Nile, so choose your words carefully from here on out.”

The implications made her stomach flip again, but she grit her teeth and held firm. “I’m not gonna help you guys torture Booker. If that’s what you’re talking about, we have a problem.”

Andy’s face was grim. “Not torture. Exile.” She stood and kept the bottle. “Book would probably prefer torture. Joe, give me a hand with these bandages.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

Nicky watched them walk up the hall, a consternated look on his face. “They left us with the dishes.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...wherein decisions are made about Booker's fate, and Nile wrestles with a lot of things.

Nile tried to sleep. She _needed_ sleep. The room was amazing, the kind of place she only ever got when a hotel screwed up so badly that they comped you because they respected the uniform. Everything was soft and clean and smelled like money. The sweatpants and tank tops Joe had bought for her fit well. It was the first real, decent bed she’d been in for longer than she could remember. But she’d figured out what Booker thought Andy shouldn’t have to put up with about forty minutes ago, by the bedside clock. She shouldn’t have to, either.

After scouting out the rest of the apartment, she wound up at Andy’s door and tapped quietly. 

“Yeah.” A sleepy voice from inside the room barely reached her.

She opened the door a crack. “Andy? You mind if I crash in here?”

“Why?”

“Nicky and Joe got going a while ago and they don’t sound like they’re finishing any time soon. I can hear everything.”

Andy turned on a lamp and pushed carefully onto her right elbow. Her face was a picture of tired disbelief. “You were in the marines. You never heard people fucking?”

“Fucking, yeah. Fucking’s all ‘Give it to me, that’s good, right there, more, harder, goddam.’ And it’s over in five minutes. It’s not ‘Ooh, my love, my heart, your eyes are my universe, ahh, ahh, ahh wait, there is time’ over and over and _over_. That shit is…” It was embarrassing, was what it was. She hadn’t even repeated the graphic stuff, and how did they make graphic stuff sound so much like courting and so little like porn?

Andy’s gaze flicked to the door. “I can’t believe they’re speaking English.”

Nile felt the heat on her cheeks. “They’re speaking enough of it.”

Andy rubbed at her side and frowned. “What’s wrong with the couch?”

“Other than that I can still hear them, nothing.”

Andy shrugged with care. “You’ll get used to them. They aren’t like that most of the time, but when they see each other die a lot…” she waved a hand. “You get used to them.”

“Any reason we can’t just stay in better places?”

Andy looked around her. “Better than this?” She lifted the covers before Nile had to think of an answer.

“Thanks. Be right back.”

The least she could do was come bearing gifts; she put two Tylenol into Andy’s hand and held out a glass of water.

“What’s this for?”

“Pain. I’ll give you some more tomorrow.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Joe’s supplies. When was he a medic, anyway?”

Andy swallowed the pills. “He’s been a medic in almost every war nations waged, mostly double-duty though. Also the 1340s and just here and there. He and Nicky and Booker did something in Rwanda. Sudan in the ’90s and then Sarajevo. He picked up a lot, over time.”

“Shiiiit. Nicky too?”

“Not as often, because he’s whiter. He had more options and more access, in most of the world. He used it.”

Nile settled down and tucked her arm under her pillow. “For what?”

“Positioning us for battle. Assassinations, sometimes, or just clearing our path.” Andy yawned. “He’s our sniper. Strategic planning when I couldn’t pass or work or fuck my way up to where I needed to be.”

“Shiiiit. Andy—”

She turned off the light. “Go to sleep or find someplace else to be. I’m fucking tired.”

Nile lay awake for a long time, but at least she didn’t have to hear the warrior medic and the assassin priest making mortifying marathon love. She settled a little deeper into the amazing pillow on the amazing mattress, listening to Andy’s breathing. There was a stillness to it, like the woman reserved her energies even in sleep.

Next thing she knew, it was daylight and the bed was empty.

Breakfast looked like it was going to be omelets with goat cheese and peppers and a pile of sautéed spinach on the side. It was the peppers she’d smelled, sautéing in a pan. Nicky stirred with one hand and cracked eggs with the other, and Joe was dicing things with a wicked chef’s knife.

She tested the waters. “Do I need to ask if you two washed your hands?”

Joe blinked. “What?”

“The room next to yours shares a vent or something. I got most of the show.”

Joe smiled, sultry and halfway toward arousal from one second to the next.

Nicky chuckled behind him, said something in a foreign language that unfortunately Nile still got the gist of, and set down the spatula. He slid his arms around Joe’s waist and started nuzzling his curls. “If you are very fortunate, Nile,” he said into Joe’s ear, “you will love someone enough to fear as we sometimes fear, and you will feel half as deeply as we feel.”

Joe reached back and touched Nicky’s cheek and Nile wanted _so badly_ to make gagging sounds.

“Okay, gross. Hands above the counter. Seriously, there are other people in the room.”

Nicky smiled and turned back to the stove. “Get the coffee, Joe.”

“Coffee, Nile? And yes, we washed our hands,” he added, and leered. Or maybe that was just how he looked when he was well fucked.

Nile made a face and backed away. “There are rules in the 21st century, guys, and one is that you should not subject people to—”

Andy limped in. “Somebody get me painkillers.”

Nile sprinted for the living room. “I’m on it.”

Andy followed her with a glass of water and swallowed two down. “If two is good, aren’t more better?”

Nile had to work her jaw to get sound to come out. “No! Some is good, and more destroys your liver in like, sixteen hours.” She looked past Andy’s shoulder. “Do _not_ leave me with them any sooner than you have to.”

Andy smiled faintly. “They’re good men.”

“I’m getting that. Still…” she shuddered.

The smile faded. “You have a problem with men together, get over it. Now.”

Nile shook her head. “I don’t have a problem with the guy-on-guy thing. They just… they’re…”

“In love.” Andy lifted her shirt to look at her bandage. It was still clean, no seepage. She seemed fascinated and horrified by it. “It’s sickening sometimes, how proud they are of each other and that love. But it’s also beautiful. Don’t ever resent them for it.”

“I’m not! I don’t.”

“Remember what I said about choosing words carefully. You’re going to be around for a while.”

Nile paused to consider that. It wasn’t resentment or revulsion. Discomfort, yeah, like catching her brother going at it. She decided to put a check on it and see what was what. “Did Booker resent them?”

Andy tugged her shirt down and smoothed it over the bandage. “No. I think he envies them.”

“But he had a wife and kids. And you said the two of you…”

Andy rolled her eyes. “Kid, you have a _lot_ of growing up to do.”

Nile resented that enough that she left Andy holding the Tylenol bottle and called over her shoulder, “Read the damned label.”

The omelets were amazing. Or she was starving. Or both.

Everyone was mostly silent again, and Nile eyed each of them in turn: Joe and Nicky didn’t do romantic stuff. They didn’t make eyes at each other or refer to last night or take food off each other’s plate. They just ate like normal people. They could’ve been any two friends in her battalion. Nicky got up for what might be his fourth cup of coffee from Booker’s fancy machine and didn’t even offer more to anyone.

Andy ate slowly. Nile wondered if she needed more antibiotics. After they got the Booker thing settled, she’d talk to Joe and figure out what he’d missed about medicine since she’d been born. They could fill each other in. If Booker had been their scavenger, and it seemed like he had, she’d have to look for other sources.

“Is there another bet, to see if I talk first? If there is, I have some ground rules.”

Joe looked startled, but he finished chewing and shook his head. “No bet. Also, no ground rules on bets.”

She’d see about that.

Andy pushed back her half-empty plate. “Nicky?”

“One hundred years,” he said.

“Shit.” This from Joe. “Nicolo, _è la metà_ —” he looked at Nile and started over. “Nicky, that’s almost half his life.”

The pleasantly full feeling in Nile’s belly turned leaden and nauseating.

Nicky kept eating calmly, chasing the last bites of omelet, and set his fork down. “Not half of his life, Joe. Half of his life with us.”

“Anybody want the rest of this?” Andy pushed her plate toward the center of the table and Joe slid it toward himself. “Technically, half of his life with us would be 87 years.”

“For you, Andy. Joe and I found him while you were still in Australia.”

Nile grit her teeth. Everything was a damn history, and she wasn’t going to learn it in a day. Wait—she could learn a hundred-and-fifty years of it. She just needed to call Copley. He could get antibiotics, too. Hell, any of them could if they went back to Merrick Labs. The labs needed to be swept of all evidence, all specimens. Maybe all people who’d seen what they were. Could Copley handle that?

“Nile.” Joe snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Did you hear me?”

She jerked a little. “Sorry. What?”

Nicky shook his head, said softly, “It is a lot to take in. You’ll adjust quickly, but. It is a lot. Do not worry.”

Joe was clearing Andy’s plate now. “Since you took the rows out of your hair,” he went on, “I thought you might want it…” he wiggled his fingers in a way that might mean ‘styling.’ “Nicky braids my hair when it’s long. It’s not as tight as yours, but he’s good at it. He takes it up now and then for other people. When was the last time, Nicky? Wasn’t that long ago.”

Nicky nodded. “The 1960s. Berkeley and Oakland. It was a very special time. I was reminded how to braid African hair from a beautiful woman named Maduenu. Voluptuous. Very dark skin.” He was talking with his hands in a way that Nile refused to interpret. “You remember her, Joe?”

“Yeah. Her son was with the Panthers.” He started laughing. “She’d host these meetings, you remember, Andy? All these guys with rifles and attitudes, and her scolding them like little children, feeding them Oreo cookies.”

Nile looked between him and Joe, not sure if they were messing with her, or what they were even saying, but Andy was smiling too. Damn, their _lives_.

Nicky shrugged and checked his watch. “Joe, Andy, you really are cleaning up the dishes this time. Let’s go, Nile.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

She did call Copley, who answered immediately and told her she should ditch the burner. “I want to meet. I want the history lesson, all of it you know. And Andy might need antibiotics, maybe a doctor who doesn’t ask questions. Are you scrubbing the lab?” He was, thank the good Lord Jesus. “Also… if I wanted to disappear, how would that work?”

They made an appointment. She destroyed the phone.

Next thing she knew, she was sitting on the bed in her unused room with Nicky behind her, her hair smelling way too macho while Nicky combed and parted and braided it.

“We don’t have a lot of time, so this will be simple,” he said.

She sniffed pointedly. “What are you using?”

“The oil Joe uses for his beard. Just a little. I could find nothing else I thought would work.”

She tried to picture him sitting in a park or a salon during segregation, his pale hands braiding the hair of colored women. Maybe his accent had helped. Maybe Joe had helped. Or maybe just the weight of time did something to them, because as much as they could blend in, none of these people felt like a faction of the modern world you’d want to push against or call out. Not even Booker, and between him and Nicky, Booker was the whitest.

Nicky finished and patted her shoulder. “ _Finito_.”

She looked at herself in the mirror and smiled at his reflection. It was good, she had to admit. “Thanks.”

He nodded, assessing his work, and ran a fingertip over the fuzz of her edges. She tried not to duck. “People change that these days. Do you?”

She shrugged. “Not today.”

“Good.” He turned toward the door. “The natural way is the most beautiful.”

Andy and Joe were waiting in the living room, jackets on. Andy pushed the elevator button. “Let’s see if he changes anyone’s mind.”

They didn’t take the car, just walked in the weak London sun. Nile thought about how they must’ve done this for most of their lives, and how she might need to get used to it. They were early by Andy’s reckoning, but when they reached a super old-looking pub by the river, Booker was already at a table by the window nursing a really tall drink. He stood up when they entered, and the bartender brought over waters before they got properly settled.

Joe didn’t touch his glass. “Last chance, Sebastien,” he said.

_Sebastien?_

“It’s not much.” He cleared his throat. “You know I want out. You can’t deny Andy wanted out.” He made eye contact with each of them like he was forcing them to acknowledge that much, and it was Joe who broke the gaze. Nicky held it but his face was a mask. Andy made a “get on with it” motion.

Booker nodded. “I went about it all wrong. The first six months we were on break, I thought about asking. Tried to work out how I could ask that. Joe, Nicky, I was afraid that you wouldn’t go along. But I knew… I thought… I thought that if it left one of you, and the other was still immortal, you’d at least want the choice whether or not to follow.

“That’s it. That’s all.”

Joe’s fists curled on the table and he didn’t look up at Booker, like if he did he’d strangle him or something. “Get out. Now. Please.”

Booker picked up his glass and scuttled out the door onto the deck.

Nile still didn’t know much about these people, and she wasn’t gonna learn today unless she asked. “Joe? You don’t believe him?”

Joe glared out at Booker’s back. “I believe him, the little shit. He thinks that will soften Nicky up.”

“As arguments go,” Nicky said, “it was very persuasive.”

“He can’t just make those decisions!”

“No, Joe, he shouldn’t.”

Nile heard the ebb and flow of their words while she looked out the window at Booker’s back. Besides Andy, he’d helped her the most. “Guys?” The conversation stopped and she just looked at them. “I vote for less time. I know I’m new here, but that’s my vote. I’m going outside.”

Booker tilted his head when she stepped up beside him. “How’s it going?”

She looked back through the window. “They’re still deciding.”

“There’s not much to decide, it’s not like they can kill me.” He turned to lean against the railing, and she watched him and Joe stare at each other through the glass.

That was too real. She pulled out her phone.

“She gave it back?”

Nile nodded. “Yeah. I talked to Copley. He said he could fix it. Make it look like I was killed in action. My family will mourn, but they’ll be able to move on. It’s just like what we did with my dad.” She didn’t want to. But whether Booker was a traitor or not, she felt like he was right about the family thing. And if him trying to hold onto his sons had messed him up this bad, it couldn’t be worth it when she was staring down hundreds, maybe thousands of years. She turned to watch light glint off the water. “I just really want to hear my mom’s voice one more time.”

He put his elbows on the railing beside her. “You’re a good kid, Nile. You’re going to be great for the team.”

She looked over at him and he smiled without meeting her eyes. “I should go back inside.”

His hand stopped her, but he still wasn’t looking at her. “You can talk to them. Nicky and Joe especially. They’re still immortal. And they still remember what it was like, becoming that.”

She debated saying anything, but decided, what the hell. This wasn’t going to be over for a long, long time. “Nicky said you all fight for what’s right.”

Booker nodded. “Yeah.”

She pointed toward the window, where Joe was talking and Andy was staring at the table and Nicky’s hands were gesturing from behind her. “He’s in there fighting for the longest exile for you.”

Booker laughed hard enough that his shoulders shook, and he swallowed it down with more of his drink. “There’s your proof.”

Nile didn’t know what to say to that. What to make of Booker saying death was mercy. She’d known plenty of assholes who looked like nice guys on the outside, and plenty of nice guys who were cocky or emotional or a little edgy like she’d seen Joe be.

Andy was the most real thing to her in all of this, but Andy wasn’t long for this world.

“Nile. What is it?”

“Not that your word means shit,” she said, and watched him nod soberly, “but they’re all good?”

“They’re the best. If you’re gonna be stuck for eternity with somebody, it might as well be people who remember what love is and don’t let it ruin them. They’re good company, too. Joe’s a damned shark on a football pitch or a basketball court, if you’re into that. But don’t bet with him until you know what you’re up against. Nicky and Andy play too. They all know every card game you’ve ever heard of, so don’t let them punk you. Joe loves sports on TV. Nicky watches infomercials for new gadgets. Offer to help him cook and he’ll talk about anything. That’s also the only way you’ll ever learn Genoan.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s a dead language. It’s the language that probably sounds like Italian to you that he and Joe slide into when they’re arguing, or planning something devious, sometimes when they’re making love. It’s good to have a little of it in your back pocket, as ammunition when you want it.”

“You’re just going to take whatever they dish out?”

Booker emptied his glass in two long swallows and set it on the rail. “I betrayed the only people in the world like me. Andy took a bullet from me that will leave a scar she’ll take to a grave. And she still dragged my ass off that medical table. Joe bought me fresh clothes. Nicky cooked me dinner. We all watched each other’s backs to get out of a prison I put them in. What else should I do, in the face of loyalty like that?”

He wasn’t a bad guy, was the problem. He was messed up, but he wasn’t a bad guy. She patted his shoulder before she went back inside.

She slid back into her seat at the table and looked at Andy, Nicky, and Joe. “I think we should make him apologize.”

Nicky threw up his hands.

“You see?” Joe was winding up again. “This is what happens when we let him talk.”

Andy ignored Nicky and Joe and nodded to Nile. “I think you should too. When you let him back in from the cold, that should be the first thing you demand from him.”

“No, I mean I think an apology’s enough. He knows what he did.”

Andy had that look in her eye, but she was calm when she spoke. “It doesn’t work that way, Nile. This isn’t Scouting. It isn’t high school. It’s a handful of us among seven billion mortals. In the world we’ve made, we pay for our mistakes so we don’t make them again.”

Andy looked at Joe and Nicky. “You’re sure?”

Nicky nodded.

Joe rubbed the back of his neck. “Whatever you say, boss.”

Nile swallowed down her empathy and tried to remember that a few years of exile wasn’t so bad, compared to a thousand or six of being together. Still. “I don’t know if I can agree to the whole exile thing. He didn’t even do it to me. He helped fix what he messed up.”

Joe was a lot quieter this time, mostly talking through his hand over his mouth. “Annoyingly persuasive.”

Andy smirked. “We all make our choices, kid. Try to stick with it for a decade, and we’ll discuss a visitation program for you.”

Nile nodded. There had to be loopholes. If bets had no ground rules, then neither did this.

Andy pushed off the table and walked out. Booker had disappeared and it took a second to spot him down by the shore.

Nile looked between Joe and Nicky. “Well? How long are we talking about?”

Joe was staring past her toward the water. “The hundred years.”

Nile looked at Nicky. “So you got what you wanted?”

Nicky’s face crumpled a little. “Not what I wanted, Nile. What must be. The fact that we too will suffer cannot mitigate the severity of his crime against us. Against even himself.”

She felt like she was tied to an electric fence and every time she thought she was getting a handle on things, the juice switched on and shocked her again. 

Andy had no religion. Joe and Nicky had… something, she didn’t know what yet. But it wasn’t the grace of the God she worshipped. It was some Old Testament shit.

“Let’s go,” Joe said.

They waited and watched from the stairs.

“She’s taking her time.” Joe didn’t sound angry.

“They’re saying goodbye,” Nicky said.

Nicky got it. They hadn’t just banished Booker. They’d killed Andy in front of him, right now. Today.

Nile had thought Nicky was the soft one, the quiet guy who cooked and talked about destiny. But she’d seen him fight at Merrick’s labs with brutal efficiency, part of a weird Nicky-and-Joe machine. He’d pushed for a sentence that ensured Andy would be dead before Booker returned. And he knew that.

_They’re the best. If you’re gonna be stuck for eternity with somebody, it might as well be people who remember what love is._

She’d jumped out of a fifteenth-floor window and killed a guy for Andy.

She needed Andy to live for a really long time. She needed Andy’s perspective, and her strength, and her hope. Nile needed to figure out who she was gonna be, because she could see, faintly, how Booker had become what he was. That wasn’t her and she wouldn’t let it become her.

Andy finally came up the stairs and they climbed together. The street noise killed all the unnatural quiet of the riverbank, and Nile took a familiar breath of traffic and smog and city.

She didn’t know how many others she’d killed yesterday: people with families. People who might’ve made families.

She looked over at Nicky. “Want to bet we’re back in touch before 2030?”

A smile ghosted around Joe’s eyes. “Don’t take it, Nicky. She can just call him and collect.”

Nicky smiled at her and shook his head. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

Nile couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of her. It wasn’t straight gallows humor, but she could see how it sort-of was, in their circumstances. She’d get used to it all. 

**Author's Note:**

> Mention of past (extremely casual) Andy/Booker, in case that's a trigger (or a draw) for you. 
> 
> The two French painters are 19th-century and would have been contemporaries of Booker’s. Between you and me, I think he worked with them and that both paintings on the wall are his. His forgeries, but his, and impossible to discern from the original artists. And worth gazillions. 
> 
> My memory of Black hair styling is faint. If I screwed it up—or anything else—I would greatly appreciate a note either in comments or at charlottechill at my yahoo account. I’m all about the revision for accuracy and clarity. 
> 
> There is some reasonable argument that to Nile, foreign languages would just sound like gibberish. If you agree, ignore the translations below. 
> 
> Munchia = common curse word, basically “fuck”  
> Cazzo = common curse word, basically “shit!”  
> Non credo a niente, Nicky. È proprio quello che è vero. = I don’t believe in anything, Nicky. It’s the truth.  
> Forse. Forse no. = Maybe. Maybe not.  
> Ah, Madre de Dio = common exclamation, literally “Mother of God”
> 
> Many thanks to Killabeez for inspiring me to write this (however unwittingly). <3


End file.
